Guardian · 20 hours ago

‘I See Them Like My Own children’: Reforesting Ethiopia with 50bn trees, One Step at a Time | Global Development...

When Halima Kedir began planting trees in Ethiopia's drought-prone Oromia region, her neighbors laughed - but she kept walking an hour each way to fetch water for her seedlings, tending them, she says, the way her Oromo tradition tends to adopted children: "I see them like my own children." Her quiet persistence has since helped shift a community's skepticism into participation, and a nation's historical relationship with its land from destruction toward restoration, with Ethiopia's deforestation rate falling by nearly two-thirds over the past decade. The story of the Green Legacy Initiative - which aims to plant 50 billion trees by 2030 - is told in grand statistics, but its roots are in people like Kedir, who didn't wait for permission or recognition to begin. Her neighbor, once a doubter, now calls her "a role model and someone willing to find local solutions to our issues" - a reminder that transformation, environmental or otherwise, tends to start with one person willing to be wrong in public and right over time.